by Dara Horn
“It will be worth it,” he told her. “I promise you.”
An instant later he saw that he had said the wrong thing, that he was merely reassuring her of her high price as a Rebel whore. Lottie refused to look him in the eye.
“Lottie, think of what you’ve accomplished already,” Jeannie said. “If you don’t wish to continue with him, don’t. He won’t be the last.”
“No, he won’t be,” Lottie said simply. Finally she looked up and smiled at Jacob, an odd, cold smile. “Thank you, Jacob, for everything,” she said. She kissed his cheek, and walked upstairs.
When they heard her bedroom door thump closed above them, Jeannie turned to Jacob, taking him by the hands. “You can’t even imagine what this means to us, Jacob,” she said, her voice hushed. “It was always so difficult with William. He was only happy if I complied with everything he said, exactly as he said it. He wouldn’t even deliver the messages for us if he didn’t find me cooperative enough.” For a moment Jacob wondered what she meant by this, before deciding that he did not want to know. “I was always expecting him to turn on me in a rage.”
“It seems he surpassed your expectations,” Jacob said. “But that was my fault.” He bit his lip, tripping on the edge of truth.
Jeannie shook her head. “It had nothing to do with you. He would have turned on me regardless. I always expected it,” she told him. “I’ve always expected it from everyone, I suppose. Ever since what happened to our mother, I’ve felt like I have to look over my shoulder all the time. All of us have.” She was gripping his fingers tighter now, he noticed, thin blue veins rising on the backs of her talented hands. “But I’m so grateful to be with you, Jacob. I—I’ve never felt so free before. Like I have nothing to be ashamed of.”
On another night, Jacob might have taken the time to be ashamed of himself. But that night he cast every hesitation from his mind. All he could think of was that he and Jeannie were now absolutely alone in the front room of the house, sitting side by side, with no prospect whatsoever of being interrupted by Philip on his way home.
ROSE GAVE JACOB the message the following morning, rendered into code. Jacob was alarmed to notice that the message wasn’t written in one of her silly anagrams, but actually in a genuine Rebel cipher, the Vicksburg Square. The commanders had briefed him about it before he left, a lifetime ago. It was a surprisingly simple code that one deciphered with a square made of ordinary alphabets laid out along the horizontal and vertical axes, so that the letters lined up in a diagonal pattern, and one simply had to trace one’s finger along the opposite axis to decipher the letters in the message. The code used key-phrases for further encryption, but there were only three key-phrases—complete victory, come retribution, and Manchester Bluff—and to decipher that layer of the code, one only needed to try each of the three. The key-phrase here, he could tell, was come retribution, and by using it, he managed to decipher enough of the first few words to convince himself that what Rose had given him wasn’t a joke. It would have taken many, many hours to decipher all of it, so he didn’t try. The larger dilemma, he knew, was that the paper he now held in his hands was what he had been waiting for, the entire purpose of his venture into the land of the Levys: evidence.
He went to Philip’s office that morning and sat at Philip’s desk, looking at the paper in Rose’s neat handwriting. The jumbled letters seemed to rise from the page, flying free in the air, forming words he had heard before. We doubted your trustworthiness at first, Rappaport, but you have succeeded in putting our doubts to rest. Please, Jacob, please trust me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. He sat for a long time with his eyes fixed on the message, immobile as a corpse. There was nothing to do at the office, of course. He left, and paced the streets, trying to think.
New Babylon was a wretched place for thinking. The only businesses that were still running well were the slave auctions. In Jacob’s wanderings around town, he passed, as usual, a storefront with a broadside proclaiming AUCTIONS AND NEGRO SALES, where a steady stream of people was moving inside. He had never been inside before, and he had no intention of going inside at that point either, and certainly no reason to do so. But that day, with Rose’s message burning in his breast pocket, he stopped on the sidewalk in front of it, hesitating about fifteen feet from the door.
Alongside the storefront was a sort of gated alleyway which he had passed many times on his way through town. In the alleyway was a row of iron doors with bolts on them, each spaced about eight feet apart. Jacob had always assumed that these were horse stables, though presumably for very valuable racehorses or thoroughbreds. But as he stood by the alleyway that morning, dragging his heavy mind through town along with Rose’s coded message, he saw something he had never happened to see before. A man in a smart suit came out of the storefront and rounded his way to the alley gate, which he unlocked with a key from a large ring on his belt. Jacob was standing just a few feet away, and out of embarrassment he pulled out his pocket watch, pretending to wind it so as to have a reason to remain there on the sidewalk. The man approached one of the iron doors and unlocked it, yelling something that Jacob couldn’t hear. Instead of horses, Jacob saw a row of slaves, chained to each other and wrapped in ragged blankets, shuffling out of the cell. He backed across the street, nearly getting himself run down by a carriage, as the man led the group out of the alleyway and into the storefront. Jacob stood there for at least five minutes, watching men in suits proceeding inside, until, without thinking at all, he crossed the street again and walked through the open door.
What shocked him most was that they were naked. On the platform at the front of the room stood eight Negroes—at first he counted seven, but as he edged his way up toward the front of the room, he saw that the platform simply wasn’t high enough, and he hadn’t been able to see the head of the two-year-old girl above the crowd. Other than the child, there were four men and three women, the men stripped to the waist and the women, to Jacob’s astonishment, stripped completely, their skin strangely shining in the daylight from the windows. The women stood with their arms crossed in front of them until buyers began climbing up onto the platform to squeeze and pinch their arms and not very accidentally brush against their breasts, all before pulling open their mouths to inspect their teeth. Jacob moved toward the platform, almost unconsciously. As he moved closer he saw that both the men’s and women’s torsos were slicked heavily with grease, to hide their scars. The soft shine this gave their bodies made the entire scene even more compelling. Jacob had never been inside a brothel, but many of his fellow soldiers in the camp had brought dirty pictures with them, and in the long dull months before he was sent to New Orleans he had naturally stared at them all. The greased naked women on the platform, and the men squeezing and pinching them, gave him a feeling familiar from seeing those pictures: a thin, weak veneer of shame barely hiding a terrifying core of animal thrill. He shuddered, trying to control it. In his first conscious movement since he had seen the auctioneer lead the slaves out of the alleyway, he slunk toward the back of the room as the auction itself began.
The first chattel on the block was “Dabney, field hand,” who, when his name was called, stepped forward, almost to the platform’s edge, and immediately began pacing the platform and even jumping up and down at the auctioneer’s command. Apparently he had done this before. He looked to be about Jacob’s age, though with a muscular body that Jacob’s office work had never afforded him. The auctioneer read off a brief description of Dabney, which mainly seemed to consist of how many bushels of tobacco he was able to carry and how far he could carry them, along with a brief mention of his history of good behavior and his lack of attempts at escape. The bidding went quickly, until the price reached a thousand fifty dollars—sold.
The winner was a man about ten years older than Jacob, wearing a linen suit and a large pocket-watch chain across his vest. He stepped up onto the platform to hand some sort of ticket to the auctioneer. But he had barely done so when Dabney took a step toward him, h
ead bowed.
“Young mas’r,” Dabney suddenly said.
Jacob was struck by how odd it was to hear his voice; a voice somehow seemed utterly alien coming from one of these greased naked beings on the platform. But what was even more unexpected was what he began to say.
“Young mas’r, I—I loves Dorrie, young mas’r,” he said, and pointed toward one of the naked women in the row behind him.
The woman he pointed at was tall, almost Jacob’s height and Dabney’s, and about their age as well. She hugged herself, and bowed her head. Among the three women on the platform, she was by far the youngest and also the prettiest; she had been the one who had attracted the most buyers to check her teeth.
“I loves her well an’ true; de good Lord knows I loves her better than I loves anyone in de wide world,” Dabney continued. His voice was trembling now, and Jacob saw that Dorrie was trembling too. “Please buy Dorrie, young mas’r. We’ll be married right soon, and de chillun will be healthy an’ strong, an’—an’—Young mas’r, Dorrie prime woman. Dorrie, come show how strong you is.”
To Jacob’s surprise, no one interrupted this display. When Jacob glanced at the auctioneer, the man even seemed to smile; presumably it was in his interest to sell off the whole platform as efficiently as possible, and this sort of drama might somehow drive up a price. The winner turned, following Dabney’s pointing finger.
Dorrie stepped forward, shivering, and slowly unfolded her arms, stretching them out in front of the winner’s face. This proved to be a colossal mistake, for the result of it was to expose her breasts once more, and dramatically, to the entire crowd. Jacob’s own throat throbbed as he felt the animal thrill surge again within him. Her body was phenomenal.
Dorrie folded her arms back over herself as the auctioneer began reading her description, something involving field work and breeding years, but it no longer mattered. The bidding for her began, and the price quickly went through the roof; soon she was more expensive than Dabney. The previous winner’s face fell as the price moved past twelve hundred. As a businessman, Jacob had long learned to tell when someone is bluffing, and he could see that the winner wasn’t. To his credit, he tried.
“Young mas’r, please buy Dorrie,” Dabney called, from the back of the platform this time, but his new owner simply shook his head, with a pained expression on his face.
The bidding slowed, and soon the auctioneer was calling for a final price. Suddenly Dabney moved forward and dropped to his knees beside Dorrie. “Young mas’r, please,” he said one more time, and Dorrie knelt down beside him. Jacob saw him try to take her hand, but her arms were wrapped tightly around herself, her eyes fixed on the floor. The gavel fell, and it was over.
The image of the two of them, naked on their knees, burned itself into Jacob’s body. He left the building and circled the town madly, trying desperately to erase it from his field of vision. After a while he turned down an alley and stepped into an actual horses’ stable, retching wildly. He forced himself to think of Harry Hyams, willing the dark bile within him to pour itself out, but he could not vomit it away. It was branded onto his gut forever.
With Rose’s message in his pocket, he proceeded to the bakery.
5.
JACOB STOOD IN FRONT OF THE BAKERY, THE IMAGE OF DORRIE AND Dabney on their knees seared into his stomach. He glanced at his reflection in the door’s window and reached for the doorknob. But just before pulling the door open, he paused. The naked women on the platform burned in his mind’s eye, and suddenly he pictured the only other woman he had ever seen without clothes. In his memory he saw Jeannie as she had been just the previous night: lying naked on their bed as he unbuckled his belt, her bare body breathing before him in the dim candlelight, waiting for him. He understood what he was selling. His hand slid from the doorknob, and he walked away.
He hurried back toward Philip’s office as he tried to justify his choice. At least, he told himself, he might already be serving his country simply by not delivering the message to Jackson as he had promised. If the Federals really were about to march on Richmond again, imagine the devastation to them that he would be preventing just by keeping Rose’s message safely in his own hands! If that were the case, then he had already saved thousands of Union lives—even, perhaps, the lives of his own fellow soldiers from the 18th New York. Besides, he reasoned, might he be even more useful to his country by simply accumulating more evidence of this type? After all, if Jeannie and Lottie were to be arrested, some other chain of spies would surely spring up in their place. But here he was stopping the damage at the source, like the little Dutch boy who saved his country with a single finger in the dike. Why not let Lottie and Jeannie continue passing their information to him, so that he could continue stopping them? Yes, he decided, that was the best approach. He retreated to the office and quickly buried Rose’s message in the lining of his hat. He sat down at Philip’s desk and composed a vague message in code for the bakery: ACTIVITY DETECTED IN HOUSEHOLD; CURRENTLY INTERCEPTING ENEMY COMMUNICATION; ESSENTIAL NOT TO INTERRUPT MISSION AT THIS TIME. When he was finished, he went back to the bakery to deliver the goods.
Jacob’s contact at the bakery had the ridiculous name of Achilles Fogg, and his surname suggested the atmosphere in his shop on that humid afternoon. The air in the bakery was thick, heavy with flour and heat. Jacob found it difficult to breathe.
Fogg was used to it. He was an old man—fat, as any good baker ought to be, with a thick mustache and a perpetually reddened face, his forearms scarred and singed from too many accidents by the ovens. Jacob often wished that he could really speak to him, if only to alleviate the sheer loneliness of what he had been doing for these past months, but also to find out what it was about him that made him do what he had agreed to do. Jacob assumed that he was motivated by some sort of idealism, imagining that he must be a secret abolitionist hiding runaway slaves in his cellar, or a practical philosopher who believed that union was the only path to peace, or a pious Christian who wanted nothing more than to help the needy and serve his God. Or it might just as easily have been the money. Jacob would have loved to ask him, but he had been instructed never to speak with him more than necessary, and Fogg had apparently been taught the same. The baker was the only person in the shop when Jacob finally entered, though there was always a risk that another customer might appear at any moment; they usually said little to each other, almost nothing at all. Fogg saw Jacob through the heated haze, and grinned.
“Thought you’d be comin’ before,” he said. “Saw you out there ’bout a quarter past.”
“Oh, yes,” Jacob stammered. “I was about to come in, but I—I left something behind at the office.”
“Not much business these days, I reckon,” he said. The phrase was a code, a reprimand from the commanders. Roughly deciphered, it meant: RAPPAPORT, WHERE IN HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?
“No,” Jacob replied, and then thought he would test him. “It seems like the auction house is the only success left in town.”
This wasn’t part of their script. The baker smiled again, but Jacob couldn’t read anything in his expression. Something told Jacob that the baker wouldn’t say anything more; he was far better at this than Jacob would ever be. Perhaps, Jacob thought while watching the man’s creased red face, this wasn’t his first war.
“What’ll it be today?” Fogg asked, and rubbed his thick hands together.
“The usual, thank you,” Jacob said.
“I got it all ready for you,” Fogg replied. “Good you don’t come in before. Ellis only jes’ deliver ’em.” Ellis was a Negro boy about Rose’s age who ran deliveries of flour and other supplies to the bakery. Of course, Ellis must have been working for them too.
Achilles Fogg brought out a small sack filled with rolls, exactly as he always did. “That’ll be seven cents,” he said. “Sorry we done raised the price. Money’s gone way down these days.”
Jacob reached into his pocket and passed him his message, along with a handful of pennies. T
he paper disappeared into the baker’s thick, sweating palm. “Thank you,” Jacob murmured, and quickly turned to leave.
“We’ll be expectin’ y’all agin soon,” the baker called as the door swung shut behind him.
That meant the commanders needed more than Jacob was giving them, and were getting impatient. Well, Jacob thought, they would have to keep waiting. He returned to the office, where he shut himself up in Philip’s private study before picking and eating his way through several of the rolls. The rolls, as always, contained what Jacob expected—and what Jeannie and her sisters needed. When the day wore thin, Jacob went back to the Levy house, filled with an intense feeling of happiness. For the first time in his life, he would be feeding his family, all on his own.
SUPPER AT THE Levys’ house since Philip’s imprisonment had become even more stultifying than before. The girls refused to speak to the boarders, and Jacob couldn’t manage to make conversation with them the way Philip always had, not with the four sisters watching him. That evening the meal limped along until everyone was done eating, at which point Lottie loudly announced that she was embarking on a new project to sew socks and shirts for needy Rebel soldiers, which she would be working on upstairs, and excused herself. The three boarders of the moment blushed darkly—war profiteers, all, who seemed to welcome Jacob’s presence, and particularly his accent, at the head of the table in the Levys’ house. But in the wake of Philip’s departure, Lottie was making it clear that the girls would stand on their own, their pride and contempt intact. The boarders looked to Jacob for sympathy, but he avoided their eyes. They quickly left, heading for the tavern. Once they had cleared the table, Phoebe and Rose hurried upstairs to join Lottie, leaving Jacob and Jeannie in the front room, alone.
Jeannie rushed toward him as soon as they were by themselves. “Did you give them the message?” she asked.